What defines family law? Is it an area of law with clean boundaries and unified distinguishing characteristics, or an untidy grouping of disparate rules and doctrines? What values or principles should guide it – and how could it be improved? Indeed, even the scope of family law is contested. Whilst some law schools and textbooks separate family law from children’s law, this is invariably effected without asking what might be gained or lost from treating them together or separately. Should family (...) law and children’s law be distinguished or treated together? One would expect disagreement on these questions in any context. In bringing together theorists from multiple jurisdictions and at least two primary disciplines, we should not be surprised to find deep differences in approach reflecting different methodologies and foundational questions. The tension between them, we hope, can illuminate and enrich discussion on all sides. (shrink)

Summary The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of contingent teacher praise, as specified by Canter's Assertive Discipline programme, on children's on?task behaviour. In Western Australian primary schools (and in an increasing number of British schools) Canter's programme is widely used. However, while there are many anecdotal reports of its effectiveness there is a relative absence of well controlled research studies reporting objective data. In the present study, three teachers from three separate primary schools and eight randomly (...) selected children from each of their classes were systematically observed. Continuous data collection indicated that following training in the appropriate use of praise, as specified by Canter, all three teachers successfully increased their rates of praising. Of the 24 children, all but one evidenced increases in levels of on?task behaviour. However, observations conducted during a follow?up phase revealed reductions in the use of praise by the teachers and in some levels of on?task behaviour. (shrink)

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue concerns (...) the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...) underdetermination thesis, and show how this moves the debate forward in fruitful ways: in distinguishing between different types of permissivism, in dispelling classic objections to permissivism, and in shedding light on the relationship between permissivism and evidentialism. (shrink)

It is often assumed that morally permissible acts are morally better than impermissible acts. We call this claim Betterness of Permissibility. Yet, we show that some striking counterexamples show that the claim’s truth cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, even if Betterness of Permissibility is true, it is unclear why. Apart from appeals to its intuitive plausibility, no arguments in favour of the condition exist. We fill this lacuna by identifying two fundamental conditions that jointly entail betterness of permissibility: ‘reasons (...) monotonicity of permissibility’ and the ‘weak classical view’. We then argue that there are good reasons for accepting both of the fundamental conditions. We note that there exist plausible moral theories that reject one of the fundamental conditions. However, the way in which those theories reject the fundamental conditions does not allow them to endorse the counterexamples that motivate the belief that Betterness of Permissibility might be false. (shrink)

What attitude should philosophers take toward their favorite philosophical theories? I argue that the answer is belief and middling to low credence. I begin by discussing why disagreement has motivated the view that we cannot rationally believe our philosophical theories. Then, I show why considerations from disagreement actually better support my view. I provide two additional arguments for my view: the first concerns roles for belief and credence and the second explains why believing one’s philosophical theories is superior to accepting (...) them. I close by addressing objections, including implications my view has for the Lockean thesis, the view that there is a normative connection between belief and high credence. (shrink)

In this chapter, Kyle Ferguson argues for an individualist account of Sellarsian we-intentions. According to the individualist account, we-intentions’ intersubjective form renders them shareable rather than requiring that they be shared. Contrary to collectivist accounts, one may we-intend independently of whether and without presupposing that one's community shares one's we-intentions. After providing textual support, Ferguson proposes and implements a strategy of reportorial ascent, which strengthens the case for the individualist account. Reportorial ascent involves reflecting on the sentences one (...) would use to report or self-ascribe we-intentions. As Ferguson argues, we-intention-reporting sentences have ‘I’ as their subjects, which reveals that their truth conditions, like the performance conditions of their expressive counterparts, are satisfied by the individual who reports or expresses those intentions rather than by the host community. We-intention-reporting sentences, which make explicit both dimensions of independence and shareability, also reveal that intersubjective form is a feature of we-intentions qua mental states rather than a feature of their contents. Ferguson concludes that although the individualist account needs further development, the sketch provided in this chapter is compelling enough to demand that individualism and independence be moved from the periphery to the core of our study of we-intentions in Sellars's practical philosophy. (shrink)

How to find freedom from fear: Buddhist teachings that really work, from a respected contemporary teacher. Fear is something that's such a part of our lives that it doesn't seem it would be possible to live without it. This book disputes that claim in a powerful way. Gaylon Ferguson presents traditional Buddhist teachings to show that the fear that so often wreaks havoc on us is in fact quite insubtantial—and it's mostly something we create ourselves. If we can learn (...) to see that, it becomes pretty simple to un-create it, and we also discover that there's a natural fearlessness in us that goes far deeper than fear. With this natural bravery as our foundation, we can live our own lives more effectively and also be a better help and comfort to others. (shrink)

Like many intensional logics, William Parry’s logic of analytic implication PAI admits extensions determined by imposing semantic conditions on its account of modality. PAI is unique, however, in its allowing a second dimension—a topic-theoretic dimension—along which extensions can be defined. The recent introduction by Francesco Berto of topic-sensitive intentional modals (TSIMs)—which disagree with PAI on this type of condition—provide further motivations to examine such topic-theoretic extensions. In this paper, we introduce, motivate, and characterize a number of such extensions of PAI, (...) paying special attention to applications to Berto’s framework and to ways in which the modal and topic-theoretic dimensions influence one another. (shrink)

Leading scholars traverse the wide range of political action when "no" is in the picture, analyzing topics such as collective action, antisocialism, empirical science, the negative and the affirmative in Deleuze and Derrida, the "real" and the "clone," Native sovereignty, and Afropessimism.

Traditional theistic arguments conclude that God exists. Pragmatic theistic arguments, by contrast, conclude that you ought to believe in God. The two most famous pragmatic theistic arguments are put forth by Blaise Pascal (1662) and William James (1896). Pragmatic arguments for theism can be summarized as follows: believing in God has significant benefits, and these benefits aren’t available for the unbeliever. Thus, you should believe in, or ‘wager on’, God. This article distinguishes between various kinds of theistic wagers, including finite (...) vs. infinite wagers, premortem vs. postmortem wagers, and doxastic vs. acceptance wagers. Then, we’ll turn to the epistemic-pragmatic distinction, and discusses the nuances of James’ argument, and how views like epistemic permissivism and epistemic consequentialism provide unique “hybrid” wagers. Finally, we’ll cover outstanding objections and responses. (shrink)

Recent defenses of same-sex marriage and polygamy have invoked the liberal doctrines of neutrality and public reason. Such reasoning is generally sound but does not go far enough. This paper traces the full implications of political liberalism for marriage. I argue that the constraints of public reason, applied to marriage law, entail ‘minimal marriage’, the most extensive set of state-determined restrictions on marriage compatible with political liberalism. Minimal marriage sets no principled restrictions on the sex or number of spouses and (...) the nature and purpose of their caring relationships, nor on which marital rights are exchanged, and whether they are exchanged reciprocally or asymmetrically. Minimal marriage supports adult care networks, urban tribes, friendships, and other forms of relationships as well as ‘traditional’ marriages. I provide a publically justifiable rationale for a legal framework supporting non-dependent caring relationships between adults. The argument is that caring relationships are primary goods, and that liberal justice accordingly requires legal frameworks supporting caring relationships. Minimal marriage is one such framework. (shrink)

Although the work of G.F.C. Griss is commonly understood as a program of negationless mathematics, close examination of Griss’s work suggests a more fundamental feature is its executability, a requirement that mental constructions are possible only if corresponding mental activity can be actively carried out. Emphasizing executability reveals that Griss’s arguments against negation leave open several types of negation—including D. Nelson’s strong negation—as compatible with Griss’s intuitionism. Reinterpreting Griss’s program as one of executable mathematics, we iteratively develop a pair of (...) bilateral constructive logics and argue for their adequacy as accounts of the propositional basis of Griss’s work. We conclude by observing connexive features exhibited by the two bilateral logics and by investigating the difficulties connexive principles reveal for the development of executable mathematics. (shrink)

This book brings together recent work on the topic of exploitation from philosophy, political science, and economics in one volume, organised around three main questions: what is exploitation?, why is exploitation wrong?, and what should we do about it? These questions are increasingly relevant in public policy discussions. The past decade has witnessed the rise of populism and an increasing sense that politics is a game rigged to benefit certain classes of persons at the expense of others. Interestingly, this sense (...) of unfairness has been shared across the political spectrum though, of course, the left and right differ in both their moral diagnosis and their political prescription. Current debates over minimum wage laws, immigration reform, and undue corporate influence on politics can all be understood as drawing on and developing these concerns over exploitative political treatment. This book also draws upon the natural opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement that the topic of exploitation presents. Questions about exploitation often involve not only philosophical issues, but economic and political ones as well. The contributors to this volume add to that breadth of knowledge. With the re-emergence of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) as a burgeoning field of academic inquiry, now is the perfect time to explore issues of exploitation in an interdisciplinary, public-policy focused context. This books is essential reading for anyone interested in exploitation theory, and in PPE more generally. (shrink)

In this paper, the notion of structural completeness is explored in the context of a generalized class of superintuitionistic logics involving also systems that are not closed under uniform substitution. We just require that each logic must be closed under D-substitutions assigning to atomic formulas only ∨\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\vee $$\end{document}-free formulas. For these systems we introduce four different notions of structural completeness and study how they are related. We focus on superintuitionistic inquisitive logics (...) that validate a schema called Split and have the disjunction property. In these logics disjunction can be interpreted in the sense of inquisitive semantics as a question forming operator. It is shown that a logic is structurally complete with respect to D-substitutions if and only if it includes the weakest superintuitionistic inquisitive logic. Various consequences of this result are explored. For example, it is shown that every superintuitionistic inquisitive logic can be characterized by a Kripke model built up from D-substitutions. Additionally, we resolve a conjecture concerning superintuitionistic inquisitive logics due to Miglioli et al.. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...

What is wrong with colonialism? The standard—albeit often implicit—answer to this question has been that colonialism was wrong because it violated the territorial rights of indigenous peoples, where territorial rights were grounded on acquisition theories. Recently, the standard view has come under attack: according to critics, acquisition based accounts do not provide solid theoretical grounds to condemn colonial relations. Indeed, historically they were used to justify colonialism. Various alternative accounts of the wrong of colonialism have been developed. According to some, (...) colonialism involved a violation of territorial rights grounded on legitimate state theory. Others reject all explanations of colonialism's wrongfulness based on territorial rights, and argue that colonial practices were wrong because they departed from ideals of economic, social, and political association. In this article, we articulate and defend the standard view against critics: colonialism involved a procedural wrong; this wrong is not the violation of standards of equality and reciprocity, but the violation of territorial rights; and the best foundation for such territorial rights is acquisition based, not legitimacy based. We argue that this issue is not just of historical interest, it has relevant implications for the normative evaluation of contemporary inequalities. (shrink)

Background: According to the Declaration of Helsinki, patients who take part in a clinical trial must be adequately informed about the trial's aims, methods, expected benefits, and potential risks. The declaration does not, however, elaborate on what “adequately informed” might amount to, in practice. Medical researchers and Local Research Ethics Committees attempt to ensure that the information which potential participants are given is pitched at an appropriate level, but few studies have considered whether the patients who take part in such (...) trials feel they have been given adequate information, or whether they feel able to understand that information.Objectives: To explore trial participants' views on the amount of information provided, and of their own understanding of that information.Design: Structured interviews of patients participating in clinical trials for the treatment of chronic medical condition.Findings: Patients generally felt they were given an appropriate amount of information, and that they were able to understand all or most of it. They felt they were given adequate time to ask questions before agreeing to take part. In comparison with treatment given outwith the research setting, patients generally felt they received more information when participating in a clinical trial.Conclusions: Researchers sometimes complain that patients are given too much information during clinical trials, and have limited understanding of that information. The present study shows that this perception is not necessarily shared by patients. More research is needed in this area, particularly to gauge whether patient understanding is indeed accurate. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in science, technology, and society has emphasized the neoliberal character of science today. This article draws on the history of US science and technology policy to argue against thinking of recent changes in science as fundamentally neoliberal, and for thinking of them instead as reflecting a process of “economization.” The policies that changed the organization of science in the United States included some that intervened in markets and others that expanded their reach, and were promoted by some groups (...) who were skeptical of free markets and others who embraced them. In both cases, however, new policies reflected growing political concern with “the economy” and related abstractions and a new understanding of S&T as inputs into a larger economic system that government could manipulate through policy. Understanding trends in US S&T policy as resulting from economization, not just neoliberalism, has implications for thinking about the present and likely future of science and S&T policy. (shrink)

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like (...) the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed. (shrink)

Exploitation: Perspectives from Philosophy, Politics, and Economics brings together recent work on the topic of exploitation from philosophy, political science, and economics in one volume, organized around three main questions: What is exploitation? Why is exploitation wrong? What should we do about it? These questions are increasingly relevant in public policy discussions. The past decade has witnessed the rise of populism and an increasing sense that politics is a game rigged to benefit certain classes of persons at the expense of (...) others. Interestingly, this sense of unfairness has been shared across the political spectrum though, of course, the left and right differ in both their moral diagnosis and their political prescription. Current debates over minimum wage laws, immigration reform, and undue corporate influence on politics can all be understood as drawing on and developing these concerns over exploitative political treatment. At the same time, the literature on exploitation has blossomed. What was once a topic of relatively narrow interest to philosophers working in the tradition of analytical Marxism has been reinvigorated and diversified. The essays in this book both represent and extend that diversity. While the condition of labor remains an important and central topic, the current volume extends the analysis to such neglected topics as the relationship between children and parents, interactions between states, and interactions between generations. (shrink)

On the phenomenal view of evidence, seemings are evidence. More precisely, if it seems to S that p, S has evidence for p. Here, I raise a worry for this view of evidence; namely, that it has the counterintuitive consequence that two people who disagree would rarely, if ever, share evidence. This is because almost all differences in beliefs would involve differences in seemings. However, many literatures in epistemology, including the disagreement literature and the permissivism literature, presuppose that people who (...) disagree often do share evidence. I conclude that this is a reason to question the phenomenal view of evidence. (shrink)

Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...) empirical, and suggest some ways that cognitive science does and could answer questions about credence, such as what credences one has, how credences relate to beliefs, and the extent to which we can control our credences. (shrink)

Much of the bioethical literature on parenthood does not address a fact about parenthood which deserves more attention: parental rights and obligations are attached to socially constructed institutional roles. Both the content of these roles, and the way in which they determine who a child’s parents will be, issue from social and legal institutions of parenthood, and this makes a difference to accounts of the moral basis of parenthood. I will argue that this poses a problem for the causal account (...) of parenthood: the variability of parental obligations, and their assignment, underscores the problems the causal account has with defining the relevant notion of cause and with fixing procreative costs. If institutional role obligations arise only through voluntary undertakings, then understanding moral parenthood as an institutional role makes the voluntarist account of parenthood more attractive. However, I must address two questions: whether such role obligations can arise non-voluntarily, and whether the voluntarist account can deal with common cases of parenthood. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Rosen's Argument Objections to Rosen's Argument The Significance of the Narrower Conclusion My Proposed View Objections to the Proposed View Understanding My Disagreement with Rosen Conclusion.

This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that the agent qualifies as sincere in asserting the contrary of what they in the most basic sense believe in virtue of asserting what they are committed to believing. It is only by recognizing such commitments and distinguishing them from the more basic beliefs whose rational regulation (...) is automatic that the tension between the self-deceived agent’s actions and assertions can be explained in a core subset of cases of self-deception. (shrink)

As algorithms have become ubiquitous in consequential domains, societal concerns about the potential for discriminatory outcomes have prompted urgent calls to address algorithmic bias. In response, a rich literature across computer science, law, and ethics is rapidly proliferating to advance approaches to designing fair algorithms. Yet computer scientists, legal scholars, and ethicists are often not speaking the same language when using the term ‘bias.’ Debates concerning whether society can or should tackle the problem of algorithmic bias are hampered by conflations (...) of various understandings of bias, ranging from neutral deviations from a standard to morally problematic instances of injustice due to prejudice, discrimination, and disparate treatment. This terminological confusion impedes efforts to address clear cases of discrimination. -/- In this paper, we examine the promises and challenges of different approaches to disambiguating bias and designing for justice. While both approaches aid in understanding and addressing clear algorithmic harms, we argue that they also risk being leveraged in ways that ultimately deflect accountability from those building and deploying these systems. Applying this analysis to recent examples of generative AI, our argument highlights unseen dangers in current methods of evaluating algorithmic bias and points to ways to redirect approaches to addressing bias in generative AI at its early stages in ways that can more robustly meet the demands of justice. (shrink)

In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact on moral judgment. Finally, (...) emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed. (shrink)

The notion of exploitation is prominent in political discourse and policy debates. It is central in analyses of labour relations, especially focusing on the weakest segments of the labour force including women and children. It features in controversies on surrogate motherhood, and on drug-testing and the price of life-saving drugs, especially in developing countries.

What is faith? How is faith different than belief and hope? Is faith irrational? If not, how can faith go beyond the evidence? This chapter introduces the reader to philosophical questions involving faith and reason. First, we explore a four-part definition of faith. Then, we consider the question of how faith could be rational yet go beyond the evidence.

Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

Introduction: "we are all Egypt" -- The allure of commonality -- Sharing the world in common with others -- Imagining the demos: sharing identity in feminist and democratic theory -- Politicizing the demos: sharing affect as self-conscious world-building -- Pluralizing the demos: sharing agency and the dilemma of democratic exclusion -- "This is what democracy looks like": protests as democratic imaginary.

Attempts to unify Marxist and feminist social critique have been vexed by the fact that ‘patriarchy’ predates the advent of capitalism (its transhistorical status). Feminists within the Marxist, socialist, and materialist traditions have responded to this point by either granting patriarchy a certain autonomy relative to capitalism (the ‘dual/triple systems’ approach), or by suggesting that patriarchal relations have a foundational and necessary status in the history of capitalist development (which we term the ‘origins-subsistence’ approach). This paper offers an alternative account (...) of the relationship between capitalism and the transhistorical status of ‘patriarchy’. In aid of a ‘unitary theory’ of Marxist Feminism, we argue that the transhistorical status of patriarchy is better understood through an application of Marx’s concepts of formal and real subsumption. A modified version of these concepts can illuminate not only capitalist appropriation of antecedent social and economic forms, but also its capacity to produce new forms of gendered exploitation and oppression. (shrink)

Lovescapes introduces the reader to the various meanings and manifestations of love and its many cognates such as compassion, caring, altruism, empathy, and forgiveness. It addresses how love and compassion have been understood in history and the religions of the world. It goes on to explore the ways that our environments and heredity influence our capacity to love and suggests ways to cultivate love and compassion in one's life. The book shows how the values of love and compassion are integral (...) to finding humane solutions to the daunting problems we face as individuals, as a human family, and as an earth community--a world in crisis. (shrink)

Where was your soul before you were born? If your soul is immortal, did it have a "life" prior to birth? Did you choose your life and parents? Is reincarnation real? Elizabeth and Neil Carman, the authors of Cosmic Cradle, address these questions through interviews with adults and children who report pre-birth experiences (PBEs) not based on regression, hypnosis, or drugs. Instead, interviewees recall their pre-birth existence completely sober and awake. In contrast to near-death experiences (NDEs), which have been (...) well documented to show us what the soul experiences after death, PBEs throw light upon our lives before birth. People with NDEs sense that they "return home" when their spirits cross to the other side. What is the nature of this place we "return" to? PBEs suggest that we come from the same place we return to: we come from the Light and return to the Light. The same eternal "you" progresses through life before life, human life, and life after death. This new edition of Cosmic Cradle explores your soul's journey into your mother's womb--where your soul comes from, the origin and purpose of your life, and the process by which you entered an earthly body. In pre-birth communications, parents meet a soul seeking to cross over from the heavenly realm to human birth. Persons with pre-birth memories recall existence in a luminous world before birth, in which they preview the upcoming life with a Divine Planner, and recall how they journeyed to their mothers' wombs. Contents Foreword by Bernie Siegel, MD Introduction: Amnesia of Our Spiritual Origins Part One: Pre-Birth Memory 1. Children as Messengers 2. Memories of the Cosmic Cradle 3. “I Was in Your Tummy Twice” 4. Scanning Soul Plans: Contemporary Pre-Birth Memories 5. Welcome to Planet Earth 6. Shirley Temple and the Blue Bird 7. Our Soul as a Tiny Spaceship 8. I Saw All My Costumes Part Two: Pre-Birth Communications 9. Souls Waiting in the Wings for Birth 10. Soul as a Sphere of Light 11. Cosmic Conception 12. Miscarriages and Stillbirths in the Light of Pre-Birth Plans 13. Conversations with Unborn Children Part Three: Pre-Birth Wisdom down through History 14. Spirit-Children Down Under 15. Lodge of the Great Manitou 16. The Cosmic Designer 17. Travelers from the Light 18. Journey from Forgetting to Remembering. (shrink)